The Wishing Thread (21 page)

“A hunch? Are you some kind of secret vigilante crime fighter? One of those people who puts their underwear on the outside and gives hamburgers to homeless people?”

“No, I’m not a superhero,” Meggie said. “I meant, I go somewhere new when I have a
hunch
that I’ll like the place. For example, I had a hunch that I would like Portland.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Except for the vegetarians. And the rain.”

Meggie took a swallow of her beer. She hoped her face wasn’t reddening. She would need to be more careful about her choice of words around Tori. Tori was the kind of person who heard everything—everything that a person didn’t actually say. And she’d never let insinuations, deliberate or not, pass by unexamined. Instead, Tori would grip the thin and slippery thread of a hint and haul it fist-over-fist to the surface of a conversation like bringing a thrashing sturgeon up from opaque depths.

The truth, what Meggie could not say to her friend, was that much of Meggie’s sleuthing was based on hunches these days. In the beginning, there had been leads—clues to where her mother might have gone that seemed to Meggie’s eye to be authentic and viable. She’d kept a journal, jotting down all traces of her mother: the collected memories of old boyfriends, reminiscences from temporary friends. But eventually the leads began to require more and more leaps of the imagination, suspensions of disbelief. When Meggie had no viable leads in a new city, she carried her mother’s picture around and showed it to people when she bought a sandwich at a deli or climbed on a bus. She showed it to old ladies in churches and middle-aged men in bars. She showed it to cops
and homeless people. She explained that the picture was from seventeen years ago and her mother probably didn’t look like this anymore. Sometimes the strangers swore they recognized her. A few had actually told her stories about Lila—old stories that must have happened in the days before she’d gone totally missing. Mostly, they just said no.

For all her endless searching, Meggie saw her mother’s face all the time. She saw it in women shopping for perfume. In women walking their dogs. She saw her mother in grocery stores, and bars, and in the privacy of her dreams. Sometimes, her mother was in a crate in the hull of a cargo ship. Sometimes she was in a misty woods tied to a tree. Sometimes she was in a jail cell or the trunk of a car. Sometimes she wasn’t trapped in any external place at all, but instead appeared to be trapped within her own skull, her eyes looking out in terror, pleading for rescue. That was the worst dream of all.

It was never too long after the dream resurfaced that Meggie hit the road, pursuing leads, hunches, and whims. Every city had brought the same thing: the rising hope, the letdown, and then, the moving on.

“What are you thinking about?” Tori asked. “Are you off on a mental walkabout again already? Where are you? Mexico? The Everglades? Yosemite?”

Meggie shook her head. “I’m not anywhere. I’m right here with you.”

Tori tipped her head, not quite believing.

Meggie knocked back the last of her beer and put it on the table with a thud. “Come on. Let’s go dance,” she said.

The sky was dark, but the birds that had not yet flown south for the season were just beginning to sing. Aubrey lay in bed, her thoughts winging her in a thousand directions, none of them expected. When she’d looked out into the distance of her life the day before Mariah died, down the long, telescoping tunnel of her imagination, she was certain to see her destiny square and true as a boat on the far horizon. She had not factored romance into the story of her life; in fact, after her early, failed attempts at courtship rituals, she had very staunchly and vigorously factored love
out
of her forecast. But then, last night, in the sticky warmth of Vic’s truck, the projected story line of her life that she’d been regularly attending to as if it were an overindulged houseplant began to sprout unexpected fruit. And Aubrey could not have been more breathless if Vic had pulled a ring box from his pocket and proposed.

She was drunk on optimism, giddy and stupid, over such a small thing as a date. Expectation had left her sleepless, grinning into her pillow like a schoolgirl, her whole body taut and silly as Cupid’s bow. All night long, she grappled with her hope, trying to wrestle it into submission, to remind herself that her future was prescribed—a life of lonely but satisfying
work within the Stitchery walls. And yet her hope could not be quashed.

When the dim glow of day came through the blinds, she was glad for the excuse to finally get out of bed. She made coffee and watched the sunrise tease the sky into lightness out over the valley. Then, although all the inhabitants of the house were asleep, she pulled on a thick brown sweater with a yoke of Norwegian snowflakes. She girded herself in a hat, scarf, and gloves, and made her way into the backyard.

The morning was nippy, the sun sparkling down on the valley as if through the hard clear glass of an icicle. The backyard—which was older and slightly bigger than many of the properties in Tappan Square—was slicked with maple leaves like a pelt of wet, ruddy animal fur, and the air smelled sweet with fermentation. The Hudson in the distance, below the prehistoric ridges of the opposite shore, was gray as slate.

She wrestled a rake out of the old, sealed outhouse and got to work. Her breath was white. Patches of sunlight felt deliciously warm on her skin. She was sweating slightly, her scarf and hat removed and hanging from a gangly rhododendron, when Carson bolted through the back door and into the yard.

“Oh!” he said. His little feet skidded on leaves, and he nearly fell.

She smiled. “Good morning! Whatcha doing?”

“Nothing.” His lip curled and he glanced behind him. “My sister’s a jerkwad.”

“What happened?”

“She took my 3DS, and didn’t charge the battery, and now I can’t play Spy Hunter until it charges again, and that’s going to take forever, and it’s not fair, and she can’t even say sorry.” He huffed, exhausted by the effort of his story.

“That stinks,” Aubrey said.

“You can say
sucks
.” He eyed her warily now, as if he’d first
thought she was a compatriot but now was second-guessing. “Mom says it’s not a bad word.”

“Is your mom awake?”

“She’s in the shower.”

“Aunt Meggie?”

“Guess.”

“Right. Sleeping.” She looked at him; he was still wearing his pajamas—sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She held up her rake like a marching band baton. “Do you want to help?”

“Me?”

“Of course you.”

“I’m too little.”

Aubrey laughed. “Who says?”

“Well …” He shifted nervously. “What would I have to do?”

“The sticks,” she said. She pointed here and there in the small yard. “If you could put them in a pile for me, that would be a huge help.”

He made one last glance behind him, perhaps to see if he was being followed. Then he said, “Okay, but can I get my coat?”

“Absolutely.”

He hurried back into the house, and a moment later he was with her again, suited up in a puffy, evergreen-colored ski jacket and a blue fleece hat with a stitched-on New York Giants logo. He bent to pick up a naked, twisted branch on the grass, a remnant of the summer’s rolling storms. “Like this?”

“Perfect,” she said.

They worked for a while in silence, Carson picking up kinked branches and Aubrey stripping leaves from the lawn to reveal the dull green grass beneath. Carson seemed agitated, working a little too quickly, with a little more focus
than a boy his age should have been able to muster for such a job.

“Everything okay?” Aubrey asked.

He shrugged.

“Homesick?”

He shrugged again.

She dragged the rake along the grass; metal tines whinnied over the earth. A layer of dry, crisp leaves hid a layer of wet ones, clumping thick and damp like the skins of ripe fruits. Aubrey tugged them into a pile, the rake scraping along the grass in satisfying little roars.

“Aunt Aubrey?”

“Yes?”

“What’s all the stuff in the tower?”

Aubrey kept her pace with her rake. “Did you go in?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Not me. Nessa said she found all this stuff in the tower. Like a museum.”

“That’s nothing,” she said, as lightly as she could. Nessa hadn’t said anything to her about finding the sacrifices. Her niece must have been snooping. “It’s just some old things.”

Carson stooped then stood, another twig in his hand. “Is she gonna get in trouble for going in your room?”

Aubrey tried not to laugh. Carson was gunning to get his big sister into trouble. She must have really ticked him off. “I’ll take care of it.”

He frowned, disappointed. “She snoops all the time, you know. All the time.”

“She does, huh?”

“Yep,” he said, almost cheerful now. “She even goes into Mom’s room at home. That’s how she found out about the divorce.”

Aubrey couldn’t help but go still, a quick hiccup in the pace of her raking, before she picked up the tempo again.
Bitty had not said anything to her about a divorce. Bitty had not said much about her marriage at all. Aubrey guessed there were problems, but she hadn’t realized how serious they were.

“You should
tell
,” he said. “You should tell my mom what Nessa did. She’s not supposed to go in Mom’s room. Or your room—right? She’s not supposed to go into
your
room.”

“No, I suppose she’s not,” Aubrey said, and she stopped raking, leaned as much of her weight on the handle as it would bear, and looked out to the river. Nessa should not have been rummaging around, not if Bitty wanted to keep the secrets of the Stitchery away from her daughter. That would have to be stopped.

But Nessa’s snooping was a minor problem—a passing shower on a bright day. Bitty’s divorce, if there was a divorce, was a storm. Unfortunately when it came to helping Bitty, questions could not be asked outright. There always had to be a kind of oblique approach, a gauche stumbling-into, or a falsely innocent, no-eye-contact advance like one might draw near a snarling dog. Bitty did not distinguish compassionate questioning from being forcibly and critically questioned.

“Where should I put these?” Carson punctured her thinking. He held a bundle of sticks in his arms. She gestured to the side of the yard. He went in the direction she’d pointed and dropped his load.

“There’s no more sticks,” he said. He stood on the glistening grass, foreshortened, asking for something that couldn’t be said. Aubrey heard the screen door swing open, and Bitty was there—awake, dressed, showered, and looking quite put-together and refreshed in dark jeans and a baby pink fleece. “You guys want breakfast?”

“Pancakes!” Carson shouted. He ran to his mother and grabbed her two hands, tugging and jumping. “Pan-pan-pancakes!”

“I’ll have what he’s having,” Aubrey said.

“Give me ten minutes.” Bitty pulled Carson’s hat more firmly over his ears, then went inside.

“Ten minutes?” Carson said. “We better hurry!”

Aubrey must have glanced away for a moment—just a second split in half—because when she regained her focus, Carson was running and shouting
“Geronimo!”
And then next thing she knew, he was waist-deep in leaves. He grabbed big armfuls and tossed them into the air; some leaves floated gently, dry as bits of paper in the sun. Others lifted, flopped, and stuck flat and wet to Carson’s hat and coat.